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Dr. Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 14 books, including, most recently, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.)
"The most impossible job on this earth" was how its first holder, Trygve Lie, described it when he received his successor, Dag Hammarskjold, at New York's Idlewild Airport in April 1953.
Five decades later, as the eighth UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, enters the final couple of years of his six, it's clear the passage of time has not made the job any easier. But there is no shortage of potential candidates vying for his office, with Ban's successor widely expected to be from Eastern Europe, the only UN region that has never held the position.
The framers of the United Nations Charter gave the Secretary-General two distinct and seemingly unrelated functions: of "chief administrative officer of the Organization" and of an independent official whom the General Assembly and the Security Council could entrust with the task of carrying out certain unspecified (but implicitly political) tasks. It would depend on each holder of the office to demonstrate whether he would be more Secretary than General.
No wonder it's impossible to write an exhaustive "job description" for a UN Secretary-General. He has been variously described as the personification of the collective interests of humanity, the custodian of the aspirations of the Charter, the guardian of the world's conscience (if not the symbol of the conscience itself), and more prosaically, as the globe's chief diplomat and its premier international civil servant.
Paradoxes abound in any description of his role (all seven Secretaries-General have been men). He is expected to enjoy the backing of Governments, especially those of the Permanent Five on the Security Council, but be above governmental allegiance himself. He establishes his credentials for office by bureaucratic or diplomatic service but, once elected, is supposed to transcend his past and serve as a spokesman for the world. He is entrusted with assisting Member States to make sound and well-informed decisions which he is then obliged to execute, but he is also authorized to influence their work and even to propose actions they should undertake.
He administers a complex Organization and serves as head of the United Nations' "common system" of agencies, but exercises this role within budgetary and regulatory constraints imposed upon him by Governments. Yes, he has an unparalleled "agenda-shaping" authority. But he unleashes ideas he does not have the power to execute, and articulates a vision for the planet that only Governments can fulfil.
He moves the world but cannot direct it.
It was Dag Hammarskjold who, at the height of the Cold War, first argued that an impartial civil servant could be "politically celibate" without being "politically virgin". That is to say, the Secretary-General could play a political role without losing his impartiality, provided he hewed faithfully to the Charter and to international law.
With the end of the Cold War, Kofi Annan went further in using the "bully pulpit" of his office, consciously abandoning the reticence of his predecessors on matters previously deemed inappropriate for a Secretary-General to address publicly. Annan boldly raised the question of the morality of intervention and the duty of the individual to follow his conscience -- "I have often asked myself why there are so few Raoul Wallenbergs today" -- and challenged Member States to resolve the tensions between state sovereignty and their responsibility to protect ordinary people.
Hammarskjold once jokingly referred to the Secretary-General as a sort of secular Pope for the world, but it was Annan who put that role into practice, winning for himself a cartoon in the Economist depicting him in papal garb. In an era of instant satellite communications and 24/7 cable news channels, the world media -- treated with such circumspection (if not outright suspicion) by Annan's predecessors -- became his church, and "we the peoples" of the United Nations his parishioners. His successor Ban Ki-Moon could not maintain that level of media prominence, but the world media remains a potent tool in the hands of a Secretary-General who knows how to use it.
Of course, it is equally true that a Secretary-General's rhetoric doesn't necessarily move governments. The Secretary-General can raise the awkward question but not dictate the apposite answer; Kofi Annan's historic speech to the General Assembly in 1999 on the rights and wrongs of intervention set a thousand flowers blooming at think-tanks and amongst op-ed columnists, but it has not led to a single military intervention to protect the oppressed.
The Secretary-General is often seen as the embodiment of international legitimacy, and his pronouncements on the legality of military action over Kosovo and Iraq reflect his own consciousness of the importance of that burden. And yet they have even less impact on the conduct of Member States than the Pope's strictures on birth control have on European lay Catholics. As the world's response to the atrocities in Darfur and other places in Africa has demonstrated, he cannot make Governments act, let alone commit troops he doesn't have.
And the Secretary-General knows he can accomplish little without the support of the very Member States whose inaction on one issue or another he might otherwise want to denounce. He cannot afford the luxury of allowing his frustration on any one issue to affect his ability to elicit co-operation from Governments on a range of other issues. Annan once made the point by citing the old Ghanaian proverb: "never hit a man on the head when you have your fingers between his teeth".
The curious compulsions of a single-superpower world place the Secretary-General today in a bind -- that of successfully managing a relationship that is vital to the very survival of the Organization, without seeming to mortgage his own integrity and independence to the dominant power. The insistent and public demands of some in the United States that the United Nations prove its utility to the Administration in Washington - demands that simply could not have been made in the same terms at the height of the Cold War - obliged Annan to maintain a paradoxical balancing act: to demonstrate his attentiveness to the priorities and preferences of the United States, while at the same time seeking to convince the rest of the world's peoples that he spoke for them all.
It remains a huge challenge to be embraced by the sole superpower without being taken hostage by it, and Annan has had to plead with American audiences to understand that the Secretary-General can only be effective across the world if he "does not appear to serve the narrow interests of any one state or group of states."
But the US is not the only Government that weighs on the autonomy of the Secretary-General. His authority as the chief administrative officer of the Organization has also been weakened over the years, as increasing levels of micro-management of budgets by Member States that have tied his hands. Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan each embarked on ambitious reforms of the UN's administrative structures, but were unable to touch the far greater levels of procedural and regulatory inertia under the authority of the Member States. No Secretary-General has enjoyed real independence from Governments: the UN operates without embassies or intelligence services, and Member States have openly resisted any attempt by the Secretariat to acquire such capabilities.
This has also served as a salutary reminder to each Secretary-General of the limitations of his position. His reach may not exceed his grasp, and his grasp cannot extend past the Member States' frontiers, or to their pocketbooks.
At the start of the 21st century, the Secretary-General of the United Nations commands great diplomatic legitimacy, even greater media visibility, and less political power than the language of the Charter might suggest. To conduct his role effectively, he needs a vision of the higher purpose of his office and an educated awareness of its potential and its limitations. He has to be skilled at managing staff and budgets, gifted at public diplomacy (and its behind-the-scenes variant), adept at winning friends amongst Member States large and small, able to engage the loyalties of a wide array of external actors (diplomats, NGOs, business groups, journalists), and sensitive to the need not to alienate those who control his resources and vote his mandates.
He has to convince the nations of the poor and conflict-ridden South that their interests are uppermost in his mind while ensuring that he can work effectively with the wealthy and powerful North. He has to recognize the power and the prerogatives of the Security Council, especially that of its five permanent members, while staying attentive to the priorities and passions of the General Assembly. He has to present Member States with politically achievable proposals and implement the mandates that result within the means they provide him. He has to conceive and project a vision of the Organization as it should be, while administering and defending the Organization as it is.
Few Secretaries-General have fulfilled all these requirements; many have been picked precisely because they did not, and could therefore be assumed to be unlikely to grow too big for their boots (the Permanent Five have no desire to see a Secretary-General capable of appealing to the world public above their heads). Still, if one were to draw a portrait of an ideal Secretary-General, this would be it. It is a different matter as to whether the world would ever get one.
And throughout the Secretary-General has to preserve a sense of the integrity and independence of his office, open to all and handmaiden to none. An impossible job indeed: it's a miracle that there are so many candidates vying for the chance to do it.
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